The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched the 22nd Scientific Satellite (SOLAR-B) aboard the M-V Launch Vehicle No. 7 (M-V-7) at 6:36 a.m. on September 23, 2006 (Japan Standard Time, JST) from the Uchinoura Space Center (USC). The launcher was set to a vertical angle of 82.0 degrees, and the flight azimuth was 149.3 degrees.

The launch vehicle flew smoothly, and after the third stage engine burnout, it was confirmed that the satellite was safely injected into its scheduled orbit of a perigee altitude of approximately 280 km and an apogee altitude of approximately 686 km with an inclination of approximately 98.3 degrees.

After more than 10 years and 40,000 orbits, a resilient NASA satellite continues to unveil the mysteries of the Earth's aurora borealis and australis, also known as the northern and southern lights.

The Fast Auroral SnapshoT (FAST) satellite was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, on August 21, 1996, into a near polar orbit. "In many aspects, the FAST mission has revolutionized our view of the aurora," said Dr. Charles W. Carlson, FAST Principal Investigator, University of California, Berkeley.

Solar flares are tremendous explosions on the surface of our Sun, releasing as much energy as a billion megatons of TNT in the form of radiation, high energy particles and magnetic fields.

The Sun's magnetic fields are known to be an extremely important factor in producing the energy for flaring and when these magnetic fields lines clash together, dragging hot gas with them, an enormous maelstrom of energy is released.

NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory mission will dramatically improve understanding of the powerful solar eruptions that can send more than a billion tons of the sun's outer atmosphere hurtling into space.

The STEREO mission comprises two nearly identical spacecraft the size of golf carts, which are scheduled to launch on Aug. 31 aboard a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla. Their observations will enable scientists to construct the first-ever three-dimensional views of the sun. These images will show the sun's stormy environment and its effect on the inner solar system. The data are vital for understanding how the sun creates space weather.

Voyager 1, already the most distant human-made object in the cosmos, reached 100 astronomical units from the sun on Tuesday, August 15 at 21:13 UTC. That means the spacecraft, which launched nearly three decades ago, will be 100 times more distant from the sun than Earth is.

In more common terms, Voyager 1 will be about 15 billion kilometers (9.3 billion miles) from the sun. Dr. Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist and the former director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., says the Voyager team always predicted that the spacecraft would have enough power to last this long.

Four university teams will share $100 million to provide experiments and supporting hardware for a future NASA mission to study near-Earth space radiation. This type of radiation is hazardous to astronauts, orbiting satellites and aircraft flying high altitude polar routes.

The teams will initially use $4.2 million to perform a one-year cost, management and technical study prior to assembling and testing their scientific payload for the mission. The anticipated lifetime cost of payload development is $96 million.

Space is fizzing. Above our heads, where the Earth's magnetic field meets the constant stream of gas from the Sun, thousands of bubbles of superheated gas are constantly growing and popping.

Their discovery could allow scientists to finally understand the interaction between the solar wind and the Earth's magnetic field.

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., will develop and operate twin NASA spacecraft to study how the sun interacts with Earth's radiation belts.

Part of NASA's Living With a Star Program, the Radiation Belt Storm Probes (RBSP) mission will determine how varying inputs of solar energy form or change populations of relativistic electrons and ions in the Earth's radiation belts - the doughnut-shaped bands of charged particles trapped by Earth's magnetic field that extend some 20,000 miles around our planet.

New funding, to extend the mission of ESA's venerable solar watchdog SOHO, will ensure it plays a leading part in the fleet of solar spacecraft scheduled to be launched over the next few years.

Since its launch on 2 December 1995, The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) has provided an unprecedented view of the Sun - and not just the side facing the Earth. Two teams have now developed techniques for using SOHO to recreate the conditions on the far side of the Sun. The new funding will allow its mission to be extended from April 2007 to December 2009.

ESA's Cluster satellites have flown through regions of the Earth's magnetic field that accelerate electrons to approximately one hundredth the speed of light.

The observations present Cluster scientists with their first detection of these events and give them a look at the details of a universal process known as magnetic reconnection.

NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft arrived today at Astrotech, a payload processing facility near Kennedy Space Center in Florida, to begin preparations and final testing for launch. Liftoff will occur aboard a Boeing Delta II rocket from Launch Complex 17 on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in the summer.

STEREO consists of two spacecraft that together comprise the first mission to take measurements of the sun and solar wind in 3-D. This new view will improve our understanding of space weather and its impact on the Earth.

When Voyager 1 finally crossed the "termination shock" at the edge of interstellar space in December 2004, space physicists anticipated the long-sought discovery of the source of anomalous cosmic rays.

These cosmic rays, among the most energetic particle radiation in the solar system, are thought to be produced at the termination shock -- the boundary at the edge of the solar system where the million-mile-per-hour solar wind abruptly slows. A mystery unfolded instead when Voyager data showed 20 years of predictions to be wrong.

NASA's Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE) satellite recently ceased operations, bringing to a close a successful six-year mission. IMAGE was the premier producer of new discoveries on the structure and dynamics of the Earth's external magnetic field (magnetosphere) and its contents.

"The IMAGE mission showed us space around the Earth is anything but empty, and that plasma clouds can be imaged and tracked just as we do from space for Earth's surface weather," said Barbara Giles, IMAGE Program Scientist at NASA headquarters.

A fleet of NASA and ESA space-weather probes recently observed an immense jet of electrically charged particles in the solar wind between the sun and Earth. The jet, at least 200 times as wide as the Earth, was powered by clashing magnetic fields in a process known as "magnetic reconnection."

Similar reconnection-powered jets occur in Earth's magnetic field, producing effects that can disable orbiting spacecraft and cause severe magnetic storms on our planet, sometimes disrupting power stations. The newly discovered interplanetary jets are far larger than those occurring within Earth's magnetic field. The new observation is the first direct measurement indicating magnetic reconnection can happen on immense scales.

ESA's Cluster mission has revealed a new creation mechanism of 'killer electrons' - highly energetic electrons that are responsible for damaging satellites and posing a serious hazard to astronauts.

Over the past five years, a series of discoveries by the multi-spacecraft Cluster mission have significantly enhanced our knowledge of how, where and under which conditions these killer electrons are created in Earth's magnetosphere.